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A poignant reminder of the ways enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners.

The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando presents the extraordinary testimony of Daniel Bennahmias, a Greek Jew whose life was forever altered by the Holocaust. Deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a teenager, Bennahmias was separated from his family and forced into the Sonderkommando, the prisoner unit compelled to work in the crematoria and gas chamber complex. Through painstaking collaboration with survivor and author Rebecca Fromer, this powerful narrative documents his struggle to endure unimaginable brutality while preserving his humanity. Bennahmias's account sheds rare light on the inner workings of Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando revolt, the death marches, and the difficult path toward liberation and recovery. More than a historical record, the book is a testament to courage, memory, and resilience in the face of systematic dehumanization. An essential contribution to Holocaust literature, it preserves the voice of a survivor whose experiences deepen our understanding of one of history's darkest chapters.

The book consists of five parts: introduction; history of the Holocaust; representations of the Holocaust in literature, film, and the arts; other genocides; and ethics. The curriculum, shaped with feedback from those who teach Holocaust studies, consists mainly of primary documents and their analysis. Each section includes a general introduction to a body of knowledge that reflects current research and detailed introductions to particular documents. Throughout the book, there are provocative discussion questions and suggestions for further reading and other resources. Each section features "links" to other parts to encourage interdisciplinary reflection. The final section on ethics addresses the difficult questions raised by genocide.

The Holocaust and Other Genocides is designed as a model for flexible, innovative teaching about this complex subject. It is also a sophisticated, interdisciplinary effort to create the conditions for discussing and understanding the genocides of the twentieth century.

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books throughout occupied Europe, an act that was inextricably bound up with the murder of 6 million Jews. By burning and looting libraries and censoring “un-German” publications, the Nazis aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish culture along with the Jewish people themselves. 

The Holocaust and the Book examines this bleak chapter in the history of printing, reading, censorship, and libraries. Topics include the development of Nazi censorship policies, the celebrated library of the Vilna ghetto, the confiscation of books from the Sephardic communities in Rome and Salonika, the experience of reading in the ghettos and concentration camps, the rescue of Polish incunabula, the uses of fine printing by the Dutch underground, and the suppression of Jewish books and authors in the Soviet Union. Several authors discuss the continuing relevance of Nazi book burnings to the present day, with essays on German responses to Friedrich Nietzsche and the destruction of Bosnian libraries in the 1990s. 

The collection also includes eyewitness accounts by Holocaust survivors and a translation of Herman Kruk's report on the Vilna ghetto library. An annotated bibliography offers readers a concise guide to research in this growing field.

Giving voice to childhood, memory, and resilience within a shared home.

The Home on Gorham Street looks back to an earlier era of care for orphaned and dependent children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Within this social history and ethnography, the voices of elders once wards of the home in the 1930s and 1940s tell us in sometimes poetic, often comic, usually ironic, and always poignant words what it was really like to grow up in an orphanage. Emerging from this penetrating adventure are principles for the future of effective group care in meeting the needs of the rapidly growing number of abused, forsaken, and orphaned children.

Goldstein's ethnography demonstrates amply that children who spend years in an institution can go on to lead productive lives under certain conditions. Such conditions may never have been met in any other children's institution. That they did exist one time, however, is cause not only to rejoice but also to understand that recreating these conditions is difficult and possibly impossible.

Few battles in world history provide a cleaner dividing line than Waterloo: before, there was Napoleon; after, there was the Pax Britannica. While Waterloo marked France’s defeat and Britain’s ascendance as an imperial power, the war was far from over for many soldiers and sailors, who were forced to contend with the lasting effects of battlefield trauma, the realities of an impossibly tight labor market, and growing social unrest. The Horrible Peace details a story of distress and discontent, of victory complicated by volcanism, and of the challenges facing Britain at the beginning of its victorious century.

Examining the process of demobilization and its consequences for British society, Evan Wilson draws on archival research and veterans’ memoirs to tell the story of this period through the experiences of veterans who struggled to reintegrate and soldiers and sailors who remained in service as Britain attempted to defend and expand the empire. Veterans were indeed central to Britain’s experience of peace, as they took to the streets to protest the government’s indifference to widespread unemployment and misery. The fighting did not stop at Waterloo.

Wherever cattle have been raised on a large scale horsemen have been there to handle them; and wherever these horsemen have existed they have left an indelible mark upon the history of the land. Frequently they have been ignorant, violent, and brutal. Always they have been vigorous and individualistic. They have taken their herds into frontier areas, opened new country, fought and driven off earlier inhabitants, participated in revolutions, battled among themselves, and generally lived lives which, colorful and somewhat frightening to their contemporaries, have become robust legends to those who followed them.

Edward Larocque Tinker portrays the life of these people in the two Americas, the conditions which created them, and those that ultimately destroyed or transformed them.

"Ever since I was a small boy, when my parents returned from Mexico bringing me a charro outfit complete with saddle and bridle, Latin America has beckoned with the finger of romance," Mr. Tinker recalls. "As soon as I was old enough, I made many trips to Mexico and, in the days of Porfirio Díaz, learned to know it from the border to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. During the Revolution I was with General Álvaro Obregón when he was a Teniente Coronel in his Sonora Campaign, and, although I was only a lawyer on a holiday, took care of his wounded in the battel of San Joaquín. Later, in Pancho Villa's train, I was present at Celaya when he was defeated by Obregón.

"Always an ardent horseman, I worked many a roundup with the vaqueros of Sonora and Chihuahua, and with the cowboys of our Southwest. . . .

"I saw the similarity between the American cowboy, the Argentine Gaucho, and the Vaquero of Mexico. They all received their gear and technique of cattle handling from Spain, and developed the same independence, courage, and hardihood. I thought if these qualities were better known they might serve as a bridge to closer understanding throughout the Americas."

From his study of the lives of these horsemen, Tinker proceeds to an examination of the literature that evolved among and then about them.

The first and largest part of the book deals with the gaucho of Argentina and Uruguay. The second and third sections examine the charro of Mexico and the cowboy of the United States.

The Arabs created one of the world's finest breeds of saddle horses, the Arabian, and they have long possessed an immense store of knowledge regarding the care, training, and breeding of this splendid horse. In the nineteenth century, General Melchior Joseph Eugene Daumas had access to their knowledge even though, as he pointed out, "it requires a great deal of patience and tact for a Christian to obtain from the Mohammedans even the most insignificant of details . . ." General Daumas was, because of his unique relationship with the Arabs, probably the first European to produce a comprehensive study of Arabian horses. And to add even greater value to The Horses of the Sahara, he was able to secure for the ninth edition, here translated, extended commentaries on all aspects of Arabian horsemanship by the Emir Abd-el-Kadar, one of the most important nineteenth-century Arab leaders and certainly one of the foremost authorities on the subject.

The Horses of the Sahara will be of interest not only to equestrians but also to historians and other scholars interested in the customs of the North African desert tribes and in the complex backgrounds of European–North African relations. General Daumas took part in the conquest of Algeria by France, so distinguishing himself that he was named Director of the Bureau of Algerian Affairs in the French Ministry of War. During the campaigns and the occupation that followed, he studied and attempted to understand the native peoples, with an objectivity and sympathy unusual among the colonialists of the period. His book provides fascinating sidelights on many aspects of Arab life, including customs, superstitions, religion, and family life.

Sheila M. Ohlendorf was uniquely suited to translate The Horses of the Sahara. An excellent rider herself, thoroughly experienced with the animals and the techniques being discussed, she also spoke fluent French, having received her B.A. degree in languages from Texas Western University (now the University of Texas at El Paso). As curator of the Hall of the Horsemen, the large collection at the University of Texas at Austin, she had access to a wide variety of supplementary authorities, which enriched both her translation and the notes that accompany the book.

This book analyses the causes of armed conflicts in Southern Africa during the Cold War. It examines the influence of the various external forces in the region during this period and their relationship to local movements and governments.

The book focuses on states experiencing violent internal conflict and foreign intervention, that is Angola, Mozambique, Namibia , South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The author provides an unique history of the key part that the Soviet Union played in these developments. Spanning 30 years, the book explores how each country struggled for genuine independence against colonialism and apartheid and their place in the wider conflicts encompassed by the Cold War.

Veteran reporter Ray Long draws on four decades of observing state government to provide the definitive political analysis of Michael Madigan. Secretive, intimidating, shrewd, power-hungry--Madigan mesmerized his admirers and often left his opponents too beaten down to oppose him. Long vividly recreates the battles that defined the Madigan era, from stunning James Thompson with a lightning-strike tax increase, to pressing for a pension overhaul that ultimately failed in the courts, to steering the House toward the Rod Blagojevich impeachment. Long also shines a light on the machinery that kept the Speaker in power. Head of a patronage army, Madigan ruthlessly used his influence and fundraising prowess to reward loyalists and aid his daughter’s electoral fortunes. At the same time, he reshaped bills to guarantee he and his Democratic troops shared in the partisan spoils of his legislative victories. Yet Madigan’s position as the state’s seemingly invulnerable power broker could not survive scandals among his close associates and the widespread belief that his time as Speaker had finally reached its end.

Unsparing and authoritative, The House That Madigan Built is the page-turning account of one the most powerful politicians in Illinois history.

In a state assumed to have a constitutionally weak governor, the Speaker of the Texas House wields enormous power, with the ability to almost single-handedly dictate the legislative agenda. The House Will Come to Order charts the evolution of the Speaker's role from a relatively obscure office to one of the most powerful in the state. This fascinating account, drawn from the Briscoe Center's oral history project on the former Speakers, is the story of transition, modernization, and power struggles.

Weaving a compelling story of scandal, service, and opportunity, Patrick Cox and Michael Phillips describe the divisions within the traditional Democratic Party, the ascendance of Republicans, and how Texas business, agriculture, and media shaped perceptions of officeholders. While the governor and lieutenant governor wielded their power, the authors show how the modern Texas House Speaker built an office of equal power as the state became more complex and diverse. The authors also explore how race, class, and gender affected this transition as they explain the importance of the office in Texas and the impact the state's Speakers have had on national politics.

At the apex of its power, the Texas House Speaker's role at last receives the critical consideration it deserves.

A young girl reckons with the demolition of a Black Saint Paul neighborhood to make way for the Interstate in the early 1960s

When thirteen-year-old Zenobia has to leave her friends and spend the summer at Grandma’s while Mama recovers from a stroke, life seems so unfair. But then the eviction letters start arriving throughout her grandparents’ neighborhood, and white men chalk arrows to mark the gas and water lines, and a new world of unfairness unfolds before her. It’s 1963, and Zenobia’s grandparents’ house on Rondo Avenue in Saint Paul—like all the homes in this thriving Black community—is targeted for demolition to make way for the new Interstate Highway 94.

As Zenobia gradually learns about what’s planned for the Rondo neighborhood and what this means for everyone who lives there, she discovers how her story is intertwined with the history of her family, all the way back to Great Grandma Zenobia and the secrets Grandma Essie held close about the reason for her light skin. With the destruction of the neighborhood looming, Zenobia takes a stand on behalf of her community, joining her no-nonsense neighbor, onetime cowgirl Mrs. Ruby Pearl, in a protest and ultimately getting arrested. Though Zenobia is grounded for a month, her punishment seems of little consequence in comparison to what is happening all around her. Even though the demolition continues, she is proud to discover the power and connection in protesting injustice.

The House on Rondo captures the heartbreak, resistance, and resilience that marks a community sacrificed in the name of progress—a “progress” that never seems to favor Black families and neighborhoods and that haunts cities like Saint Paul to this day. As Zenobia learns what can be destroyed and what cannot, her story teaches us that joy, community, and love persist, even amid violence and loss.

One of the great repositories of a people's world view and religious beliefs, the Huarochirí Manuscript may bear comparison with such civilization-defining works as Gilgamesh, the Popul Vuh, and the Sagas. This translation by Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste marks the first time the Huarochirí Manuscript has been translated into English, making it available to English-speaking students of Andean culture and world mythology and religions.

The Huarochirí Manuscript holds a summation of native Andean religious tradition and an image of the superhuman and human world as imagined around A.D. 1600. The tellers were provincial Indians dwelling on the west Andean slopes near Lima, Peru, aware of the Incas but rooted in peasant, rather than imperial, culture. The manuscript is thought to have been compiled at the behest of Father Francisco de Avila, the notorious "extirpator of idolatries." Yet it expresses Andean religious ideas largely from within Andean categories of thought, making it an unparalleled source for the prehispanic and early colonial myths, ritual practices, and historic self-image of the native Andeans.

Prepared especially for the general reader, this edition of the Huarochirí Manuscript contains an introduction, index, and notes designed to help the novice understand the culture and history of the Huarochirí-area society. For the benefit of specialist readers, the Quechua text is also supplied.

Yun Wen uses the Huawei story as a microcosm to understand China's evolving digital economy and the global rise of the nation's corporate power. Rejecting the idea of the transnational corporation as a static institution, she explains Huawei's formation and restructuring as a historical process replete with contradictions and complex consequences. She places Huawei within the international political economic framework to capture the dynamics of power structure and social relations underlying corporate China's globalization. As she explores the contradictions of Huawei's development, she also shows the ICT firm's complicated interactions with other political-economic forces.

Comprehensive and timely, The Huawei Model offers an essential analysis of China's dynamic development of digital economy and the global technology powerhouse at its core.

Since before recorded history, people have congregated near water. But as growing populations around the globe continue to flow toward the coasts on an unprecedented scale and climate change raises water levels, our relationship to the sea has begun to take on new and potentially catastrophic dimensions. The latest generation of coastal dwellers lives largely in ignorance of the history of those who came before them, the natural environment, and the need to live sustainably on the world’s shores. Humanity has forgotten how to live with the oceans.

Tracing how resistance to lynching violence generated some of the most innovative writing in American literature

On March 9, 1892, three Black men were murdered in Memphis. The violence moved Ida B. Wells to begin writing against lynching; in doing so, she helped ignite a literary tradition that would transform American literature. The dual presence of lynching violence and activist resistance gave rise to a dynamic body of African American writing that grapples with the contradictions inherent to a democracy whose citizens enslaved others.

In The Human in This Place, Jennifer Ryan-Bryant ties central moments in the history of American lynching to the emergence of new literary genres. Focusing on Jim Crow segregation, anti-lynching activism, the murder of Emmett Till, Civil Rights and Black Power organizing, and modern police brutality, Ryan-Bryant identifies the unique formal elements and themes that  characterize literary responses to sustained social violence and political resistance. The new genres she identifies—including the socialist novel, the Emmett Till poem, and the anti-epic catalogue—reveal art's resistance and response to unchecked mob violence.

The Human in This Place recognizes that lynchings occupy a uniquely disturbing space in American life: simultaneously legal and extralegal, public and private, individual and communal. The literatures of lynching investigate the ethical slippage endemic to American national identity and articulate the joyous expression that resistance makes possible.

Four-fifths of Americans now live in the nation's sprawling metropolitan areas, and half of the world's population is now classified as “urban.” As cities become the dominant living environment for humans, there is growing concern about how to make such places more habitable, more healthy and safe, more ecological, and more equitable—in short, more “humane.”

This book explores the prospects for a more humane metropolis through a series of essays and case studies that consider why and how urban places can be made greener and more amenable. Its point of departure is the legacy of William H. Whyte (1917-1999), one of America's most admired urban thinkers. From his eyrie high above Manhattan in the offices of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Whyte laid the foundation for today's “smart growth” and “new urbanist” movements with books such as The Last Landscape (1968). His passion for improving the habitability of cities and suburbs is reflected in the diverse grassroots urban design and regreening strategies discussed in this volume.

Topics examined in this book include urban and regional greenspaces, urban ecological restoration, social equity, and green design. Some of the contributors are recognized academic experts, while others offer direct practical knowledge of particular problems and initiatives. The editor's introduction and epilogue set the individual chapters in a broader context and suggest how the strategies described, if widely replicated, may help create more humane urban environments.

In addition to Rutherford H. Platt, contributors to the volume include Carl Anthony, Thomas Balsley, Timothy Beatley, Eugenie L. Birch, Edward J. Blakely, Colin M. Cathcart, Steven E. Clemants, Christopher A. De Sousa, Steven N. Handel, Peter Harnik, Michael C. Houck, Jerold S. Kayden, Albert LaFarge, Andrew Light, Charles E. Little, Anne C. Lusk, Thalya Parilla, Deborah E. Popper, Frank J. Popper, Mary V. Rickel, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Robert L. Ryan, Laurin N. Sievert, Andrew G. Wiley-Schwartz, and Ann Louise Strong.

Included in the back of the book is a DVD of a 22-minute film created by Ted White, which serves as a companion to the text.

In this bracing and original book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that today’s humanities are an invention of the American academy in the years following World War II, when they were first conceived as an expression of American culture and an instrument of American national interests. The humanities portray a “dream of America” in two senses: they represent an aspiration of Americans since the first days of the Republic for a state so secure and prosperous that people could enjoy and appreciate culture for its own sake; and they embody in academic terms an idealized conception of the American national character.  Although they are struggling to retain their status in America, the concept of the humanities has spread to other parts of the world and remains one of America's most distinctive and valuable contributions to higher education.

The Humanities and the Dream of America explores a number of linked problems that have emerged in recent years: the role, at once inspiring and disturbing, played by philology in the formation of the humanities; the reasons for the humanities’ perpetual state of “crisis”; the shaping role of philanthropy in the humanities; and the new possibilities for literary study offered by the subject of pleasure. Framed by essays that draw on Harpham’s pedagogical experiences abroad and as a lecturer at the U.S. Air Force Academy, as well as his vantage as director of the National Humanities Center, this book provides an essential perspective on the history, ideology, and future of this important topic.

In The Humblest Sparrow, Michael Roberts illuminates the poetry of the sixth-century bishop and poet Venantius Fortunatus. Often regarded as an important transitional figure, Fortunatus wrote poetry that is seen to bridge the late classical and earlier medieval periods. Written in Latin, his poems combined the influences of classical Latin poets with a medieval tone, giving him a special place in literary history. Yet while interest has been growing in the early Merovingian period, and while the writing of Fortunatus' patron Gregory of Tours has been well studied, Fortunatus himself has often been neglected. This neglect is remedied by this in-depth study, which will appeal to scholars of late antique, early Christian, and medieval Latin poetry. Roberts divides Fortunatus' poetry into three main groups: poetry of praise, hagiographical poetry, and personal poetry. In addition to providing a general survey, Roberts discusses in detail many individual poems and proposes a number of theses on the nature, function, relation to social and linguistic context, and survival of Fortunatus' poetry, as well as the image of the poet created by his work.

“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.” —Kirkus

In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.

Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.